The Commerce Department’s muddled guidance could put the United States’s technological advantage at risk and could decrease the likelihood that U.S. companies’ preferences will be incorporated in

To license medical technical standards costs hundreds of dollars. The Human Standards Project is sharing them all in a huge torrent to fight the coronavirus.

Matching entities across data sources using different identifiers and formats is a pervasive issue on the web.  This group revolves around developing a web API that data providers can expose, which eases the reconciliation of third-party data to their own identifiers. OpenRefine's reconciliation API is used as a starting point. Our goals are to document this existing API, share our experiences and lessons learnt from it, propose an improved protocol in the view of promoting it as a standard, and build tooling around it.  A description of the existing protocol can be found here: https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Reconciliation-Service-API

National Security Agency (NSA) General Counsel Glenn Gerstell presented an interesting and surprising challenge last week, writing in the New York Times that the United States must be ready to face

Origin of the toothbrush quip?

The Oxford Common File Layout describes a shared approach to filesystem layouts for institutional and preservation repositories, providing recommendations for how digital repository systems should structure and store files on disk or in object stores. The authors represent institutions where digital preservation practices have been established and proven over time or where significant work has been done to flesh out digital preservation practices. A community of practitioners is surfacing and is assessing successful preservation approaches designed to address a spectrum of use cases. With this context as a background, the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) will be described as the culmination of over two decades of experience with existing standards and practices.

You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It’ll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon…

BGP again.

At some point, compression becomes an  aesthetic design choice. Luckily, SVG is a really flexible format, so there's no reason it can't support vector JPEG artifacts.

BGP again.

Standards development: as shitty and privileged an experience as it ever was.

Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.

The organization that sets standards for the web just failed to beat back a stupid, greedy technology.

A key protocol created as a short-term solution in 1989 is designed to automatically trust users, a flaw that leaves the network ripe for attack.

How open technologies protect jobs; how copyright in software holds software users hostage.

Metadata defines the shape, the form, and how to understand our data. It is following the trend taken by natural languages in our increasingly interconnected world. While many concepts can be communicated using shared metadata, no one can keep up with the number of disparate new concepts needed to have a common understanding.